A reader from Fiji is encouraging me to pay a visit. "Fiji is heaven on earth," she says. "You'll be ecstatic here." While I have no doubt that's true, it's hard for me to imagine being any more ecstatic than I am when I travel to Hawaii. It, too, has resemblances to paradise. And the plane flight there takes five hours less and is $600 cheaper than the jaunt to Fiji. Do I really need a more heavenly heaven on earth than, say, Waimoku Falls Trail in Maui? I expect you're facing a metaphorically similar situation, Aries. The question you may want to ask yourself is this: Should you pine and aim for a state beyond perfection, or will mere perfection serve you just as well?

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Discordianism is one of the rare religions that takes account of Ralph Abraham’s assertion that heart physiologists find more chaos in the healthy heart than in the sick heart. Here’s a sampling of Discordian tenets. 1. Everyone is a saint, especially you. 2. Meditation consists primarily of cruising around looking for good luck. 3. Eating hot dog buns is prohibited, except on Friday, when it’s compulsory. 4. When you’re stuck in a rut, you must speak in tongues, handle snakes, and experience phantasmagoria. 5. Your guardian angel loves you better when your room is a mess. 6. Bowling alleys are sacred; you must protect them from desecration. 7. The Goddess will solve all your problems if you solve all hers.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

The Washington Post solicited ideas from readers about innovative strategies for wasting time. I'll offer you a few in the hope that they'll inspire you to take a major break from the Big Pressing Issues you're obsessed with. It's high time, in my opinion, to give yourself an enormous amount of slack . . . to forgive yourself for not being perfect . . . to dissolve any guilt you feel for not having accomplished all your life goals yet. In that spirit, consider the following time-wasters: (1) Send letters to the editor about grammatical mistakes in the classified ads. (2) Make yourself the world's top expert on a person randomly chosen from the phone book. (3) Keep a logbook in your bathroom to verify that the toilet bowl cleaner really does work for 1,000 flushes. (4) Set the Guinness record for time spent reading the Guinness Book of Records.

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Tantric sex practitioners say an artful lover never makes love the same way twice.

Similarly, chanteuse Billie Holiday believed a good singer should never sing a song the same way twice. If you use all the same phrasing and melody, she said, you’re failing your art.

The only Zen master we know--whose name we can’t tell you because she changes it every week, and we haven’t heard the latest one--likes to quote the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus: "You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you."
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

In her book Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, biologist Olivia Judson extols the male members of the fruitfly species Drosophila bifurca. Although they are barely one-eighth of an inch long, their sperm can be up to 2.3 inches long. If a man were capable of the same prodigious production, his sperm would be as big as a whale. Metaphorically speaking, you Geminis now have the ability to generate phenomena on this scale. That's why I hope you will devote all your ingenuity and resourcefulness to creating an intricate, beautiful masterpiece, not a humongous, complicated mass of confusion.

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A common obstruction to a vital intimate relationship with another human being is what I call the assumption of clairvoyance. You imagine, perhaps unconsciously, that your partner or friend is somehow magically psychic when it comes to you—so much so that he or she should unfailingly intuit exactly what you need, even if you don’t ask for it. This fantasy may seem romantic, but it can single-handedly sink the most promising alliances. To counteract any tendencies you might have to indulge in the assumption of clairvoyance, practice stating your desires aloud.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

Lewis Thomas was a physician who wrote elegantly about biology in books like The Lives of a Cell. I want to bring your attention to his meditation on warts. "Nothing in the body has so much the look of toughness and permanence as a wart," he wrote. And yet "they can be made to go away by something that can only be called thinking . . . Warts can be ordered off the skin by hypnotic suggestion." (tinyurl.com/3clzc5) Thomas regarded this phenomenon as "absolutely astonishing, more of a surprise than cloning or recombinant DNA." According to my astrological reckoning, Cancerian, you currently have a comparable marvel at your disposal. Using the power of your mind, you can shrink, dissolve, or banish a wart-like vexation.

"I admire your boldness in naming the currents flowing beneath the surface," I replied, "but I’m curious as to why you imply they’re all negative. To practice radical authenticity, shouldn’t you also express the raw truth about what’s right, good, and beautiful? Shouldn’t you unleash the praise and gratitude that normally go unspoken?"

Brandon sneered. He thought my version of radical authenticity was wimpy. I hope you don’t. As a budding lover of life, you have a mandate to be honest in both ways.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

This would be a perfect time for you to write your ultimate personal manifesto. I'm talking about composing a sweeping statement of the core ideas that fuel your lust for life. To get you in the mood, take a look at the following lyrics from Danny Schmidt's song "Company of Friends." "I believe in restless hunger . . . I believe in private thunder . . . I believe in inspiration . . . I believe in slow creation . . . I believe in lips on ears . . . I believe in being wrong . . . I believe in contradiction . . . I believe in living smitten . . . I believe our book is written by our company of friends."

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"Kumulipo" is an old Hawaiian prayer chant that poetically describes the creation of the world. The word literally means "beginning-in-deep-darkness." Here darkness doesn’t connote gloom and evil. Rather, it’s about the inscrutability of the embryonic state; the obscure chaos that reigns before germination. Think about the last time you dwelt in kumulipo.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

"The Japanese believe that crying babies grow fast," wrote John Flinn in the San Francisco Chronicle, "and that the louder an infant wails, the more the gods have blessed it." The astrological omens suggest that a similar principle will soon hold true for you: The more you sob and blubber, the smarter you'll get. The louder you howl and moan, the more likely you'll be to attract benevolent influences and unexpected help.

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Write the following on a piece of red paper and keep it under your pillow. "I, [put your name here], do solemnly swear on this day [put date here] that I will devote myself for a period of seven days to learning my most important desire. No other thought will be more uppermost in my mind. No other concern will divert me from tracking down every clue that might assist me in my drive to ascertain the one experience in this world that deserves my brilliant passion above all others."
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

In order for some plants to thrive in the tropical forests of South America, they need bats to eat their fruits and poop out their seeds while flying around. Biologists call the bat excrement by a more lyrical name: seed rain. It's not too much of a stretch to invoke this relationship as an apt metaphor for your life right now, Libra. Like the bat-dependent plants, you now require the help of fertility agents whose work may be a bit messy.

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Like all of us, you have desires for things that you don’t really need and aren’t good for you. But you shouldn’t disparage yourself for having them, nor should you conclude that every desire is tainted. Rather, think of your misguided longings as the bumbling, amateur expressions of a faculty that will one day be far more expert. They’re how you practice as you work toward the goal of becoming a master of desire. It may take a while, but eventually you will get the hang of wanting things that are really good for you, and good for everyone else, too.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

It's the Week of the Fabulous Smirk. Not the Week of the Arrogant Smirk or the Vengeful Smirk or the Hateful, Whiny, Passive-Aggressive Smirk. Rather, the Smirk that Passeth All Understanding. The Wise, Charitable, Forbearing Smirk. The Uber-Smirk that says, "I've figured out what everyone's hiding, and I love them anyway." You are ready, Scorpio, to explore the Divine Smirk that arises naturally when you have outwitted an obstacle that was obscuring the truth from you; when you have finally seen through the delusion you were under and guessed the secret you weren't smart enough to see before.

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Plant orchids on a strip-mined hill.
Imagine you have a guardian angel who looks like Malcolm X.
Teach an animal to dance.
Hire a puppet troupe to reenact your life story using marionettes in Renaissance costumes.
Make believe you are the ocean king or thunder queen.
Improvise a fresh bedtime story for someone you love.
Put on an inflatable sumo wrestler costume and play a bagpipe as badly as possible.
Watch TV with your third eye.
Sip holy water blessed by a smart teenage girl.
Bear in mind that you are the Chosen One, and so is everyone else.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

This would be a good week for you to compete in a flamethrower competition. You'd probably win. Why? Because according to my analysis of the astrological omens, you currently have an unprecedented knack for playing with fire. You would most likely also be victorious in a marshmallow-roasting contest or a jump-over-the-bonfire tournament. And you would probably do surprisingly well in any activity that might be described as "sitting in the hot seat."

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If I ever produce a self-help manual called The Reverse Psychology of Getting Everything You Want, it will discuss the following paradoxes:
a. People are more willing to accommodate your longings if you’re not greedy or grasping.
b. A good way to achieve your desires is to cultivate the feeling that you’ve already achieved them.
c. Whatever you’re longing for has been changed by your pursuit of it. It’s not the same as it was when you felt the first pangs of desire. In order to make it yours, then, you will have to modify your ideas about it.
d. Be careful what you wish for because if your wish does materialize it will require you to change in ways you didn’t foresee.
Review your own life and identify experiences that exemplify these four principles.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

"The great theme is not Romeo and Juliet," said poet Anne Sexton. "The great theme we all share is that of becoming ourselves, of overcoming our father and mother, of assuming our identities somehow." This is certainly your great theme, Capricorn. And it's especially important for you to devote yourself to it now. You're at a turning point in your life-long transformation. You're being presented with a clear-cut choice between sinking back into the ill-fitting yet comfortable mold that others have shaped for you, or else striding out into the frontier in a brave push to become a higher, deeper, more complete version of yourself.

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A thousand years from today, everyone you know will be long dead and forgotten. There’ll be nothing left of the life you love, no evidence that you ever walked this planet. That, at least, is what the fundamentalist materialists would have you believe. But suppose the truth is very different? What if in fact every little thing you do subtly alters the course of world history? What if your day-to-day decisions will actually help determine how the human species navigates its way through the epic turning point we’re living through? And finally, what if you will be alive in a thousand years, reincarnated into a fresh body and in possession of the memories of the person you were back in this era? These are my hypotheses. These are my prophecies. Which is why I say: Live as if your soul is eternal.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

"We only hear questions that we are able to answer," said Friedrich Nietzsche. Luckily for you, Aquarius, there are two big, long-simmering questions for which you have recently begun to sniff out the answers. That means you're now able, at least potentially, to hear those questions. I have three pieces of advice to help ensure that you actually hear them. First, wash your brain out so it's got more free space in it. Second, give your listening skills a tune-up. Third, meditate on Edgar Allen Poe's idea that "Those who dream by day know many things which escape those who dream only by night."

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In The Book of Embraces, Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano writes, "The fishermen of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or 'feeling-thinking,' to define language that speaks the truth." Describe a time when you pulled off the feat of thinking with your heart and feeling with your head.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

Back in 1995, I began seeing a psychotherapist whose influence ultimately improved me in a thousand ways. At the end of our first session, she handed me a note as I left. It read: "If you don't articulate your conscious desires, your unconscious patterns will come true." She gazed at me firmly and said, "Don't come back until you've proved to yourself that those words are true. All my work will be of no use to you unless you take them to heart." It took me exactly 23 days to prove to myself that what she'd written was true. Now I offer you the same challenge, Pisces. Spend the upcoming week in intense contemplation on the hypothesis, "If you don't articulate your conscious desires, your unconscious patterns will come true."

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When you’re an aspiring master of pronoia, you see the cracks in the facades as opportunities; inspiration erupts as you careen over bumps in the road; you love the enticing magic that flows from situations that other people regard as rough or crooked. "That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal," wrote poet Charles Baudelaire, "from which it follows that irregularity—that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment—is an essential part and characteristic of beauty."
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.